As a founder member of Mystery Women in 1997, promoting Crime Fiction has always been my passion.
Following the closure of Mystery Women, a new group was formed on 30th January 2012 promoting crime fiction.
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Monday, 31 October 2016

‘Faith and Beauty’ by Jane Thynne

Published
by Simon and Schuster, 10 March 2016. ISBN: 978-1-4711-3191-3(PB)

Berlin 1938. The city is jubilantly celebrating
Hitler's birthday. But at the same time there are those in Berlin who lead
double lives. One of those is the film actress Clara Vine, half-English and
half-German. Because she is a film star she has been taken up by some of the
wives of the Nazi elite who gossip interminably, particularly Magda, wife of
Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister in the Hitler government and one of the
dictator's most fanatical supporters. (Being befriended by Magda Goebbels is
not dissimilar to being befriended by a poisonous black tarantula!) What no-one
suspects is that Clara has also been recruited by British Intelligence to report
back on all the gossip she picks up. British Intelligence is especially
interested in anything confirming the rumours that Germany and Russia are about
to enter into a non-aggression pact. And Clara has a secret even more dangerous
to herself; her German mother was actually Jewish and Clara's identification
papers are forgeries.

Meanwhile the body
of Lotte Franke from the Faith and Beauty Society which trains suitably Aryan
young women to be wives of the Nazi elite has been found in a shallow grave in
woods outside Berlin. (The Society really existed; I thought it sounded too
absurd to be true but online research showed that that was not the case.) The
murder is dismissed as the act of a maniac but Lotte's friend and fellow
student Hedwig Holz knows that there was something more: Lotte had a secret
lover. And she had hinted at a major secret. Clara had known Lotte and felt
that the intelligent, independent-minded girl was not committed to life as a
Nazi bride. But Clara has her own troubles: Magda Goebbels has murmured that
there are people within the Nazi ranks who are suspicious of Clara. Is Magda's
warning genuine or is she activated by malice? And what is the role of the
handsome SS officer Konrad Adler? Is he just an Aryan automaton? Or is he
something else? What was Lotte Franke's secret and did it lead to her death?
And, for Clara above all, what has happened to Clara's lover, the British
Intelligence officer Leo Quinn who had recruited her into undercover work? Is
he, as she has been told, dead? Or is that yet another lie?

I heard Jane
Thynne speaking at an event in Chiswick Library on September 19th.
She was one of four writers who had set books in Germany before, during and
after World War II. And I discovered she is the wife of the writer Philip Kerr
whose Bernie Gunther novels, some of which have been reviewed in Mystery
People, cover that period although I can't pretend to have read them all.
Jane Thynne has used extensively the diaries of various Nazi wives particularly
that of Magda Goebbels. It seems that the marriages of the various Nazi leaders
were tumultuous to a degree and the leaders themselves loathed each other
almost as much as their wives loathed their husbands, their husbands'
mistresses and each other. For me this was a real eye-opener as was just how
delusional was the myth of Aryan racial superiority and the extraordinarily
ridiculous lengths to which the so-called scholars of the time were prepared to
go to support it. The myth was ludicrous, leading to the proposition that Tibetans
and Mongols were really Aryan and that the builders of the Inca and Mayan
temples were descended from Aryan tribes who settled in South and Central
America a million years ago! One might laugh except that the consequences for
Jews, gypsies and other groups deemed sub-human were so terrible. Today, of
course, thanks to scientific research, we know that human evolution is a far
longer, far more complex and infinitely more interesting story.

I was also struck
by a fundamental difference between the two writers albeit that they share a
home and family. Far be it from me to suggest that all male writers write in
one way, and women writers write in another way. They don't; nor should they.
But in the Bernie Gunther novels Bernie has a number of relationships none of
which ultimately work out and I suspect he doesn't really try. He is
essentially a cynical, wisecracking loner. However, although Clara is also the
protagonist who features in Jane Thynne's novels, her attitude to her lover Leo
and his to her are quite different; her love for him is intense and profound
and one senses that his love for her is the same, whatever the truth about his
apparent disappearance.As for what
happens to them both that will have to wait for more novels in the series. The
same is true of Hedwig, Lotte's friend, and her Polish-origin beloved Jochen,
active in the Rote Kapelle anti-Nazi movement: will they survive the horrors of
World War II? I rather liked Hedwig: essentially innocent and lacking in
self-confidence and, although supporting the Nazi ideology - after all in the
totalitarian state it was all she knew – yet aware that something was very
wrong and prepared in the end to follow her conscience and do what was right.

I was deeply
impressed with this book, both the gripping story and the research which went
into it. I shall look for the previous Clara Vine novels – Black Roses, The
Winter Garden, A War of Flowers – and await eagerly the next in the series,
Solitaire.

------

Reviewer: Radmila May

Jane Thynne was born in Venezuela and educated in
London. She graduated from Oxford University with a degree in English and
joined the BBC as a journalist. She has also worked at The Sunday Times, The
Daily Telegraph and The Independent, as well as for numerous British magazines.
She appears as a broadcaster on Radio 4. Jane is married to the writer Philip
Kerr. They have three children and live in London. Find out more at
www.janethynne.com connect with her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter
@janethynne

Radmila Maywas born in the U.S. but
has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague.
She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for
many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them
including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late
husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015.
She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two
of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is
to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now
concentrating on her own writing.

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About Me

From an early age I have been a lover of crime fiction. Discovering like minded people at my first crime conference at St Hilda’s Oxford in 1997, I was delighted when asked to join a new group for the promotion of female crime writers. In 1998 I took over the running of the group, which I did for the next thirteen years.
During that time I organised countless events promoting crime writers and in particular new writers. But apart from the sheer joy of reading, ‘I actually love books, not just the writing, the plot or the characters, but the sheer joy of holding a book has never abated for me. The greatest gift of my life has been the ability to read'.